In the 1970s, both in Europe and the United States, a series of events ensued that transformed our conception of what up to then had been understood as art. One of the leaders of this transformation was Walter De Maria, who died of a stroke in Los Angeles on 25 July 2013, at the age of 77. The problem now with artists who began to work during the marvelous convulsed decade of the 1970s is how to save them from media-created commonplaces. Walter De Maria has been classified as a sculptor, as a minimalist, and as a builder of ‘earthworks’. These convenient tags, disseminated in manuals on art, are a hindrance to a proper understanding of his contribution to art and the contemporary sensibility...